African-American
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See also: African American
English[edit]
Alternative forms[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Patterned on forms such as Irish-American, popularized by Jesse Jackson[1] and in common use since the late 1980s.[2]
Pronunciation[edit]
Adjective[edit]
African-American (comparative more African-American, superlative most African-American)
- (of a person) American and black.
- Synonym: Afro-American
- (US, nonstandard, proscribed, of a person) Of Black African descent.
- An American who is of Sub-Saharan African ancestry.
- Of or pertaining to the culture of African-American people.
Usage notes[edit]
- In the US, this term is often seen as a more formal and polite alternative to black.
- Aside from black and of color, most other synonyms are dated, and likely to be considered offensive in the US.
- This term is not used (except realistically) for Americans of North African descent, such as Moroccans or Egyptians, nor is it used for White Africans. It is specifically used to refer to the group of people that have descended from the Atlantic slave trade, racial segregation, and the civil rights movement that have resided in the United States for centuries as well as other Americans with African heritage but the term is sometimes used incorrectly to refer to other groups of people, such as West Indians, more recent African immigrants, or erroneously to any black person, even if not African or American.
Translations[edit]
American and black
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Noun[edit]
African-American (plural African-Americans)
- A black American.
- Synonyms: Afro-American, Afromerican, (slang, archaic, US) unbleached American; see also Thesaurus:person of color
- (US, nonstandard, proscribed) Any black person.
Usage notes[edit]
- See the notes about the adjective, above.
Translations[edit]
A black American
References[edit]
- ^ Isabel Wilkerson (January 31, 1989), “‘African-American’ Favored By Many of America's Blacks”, in The New York Times, page A1: “A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country.”
- ^ African-American at Google Ngram Viewer
Further reading[edit]
African Americans on Wikipedia.Wikipedia - “African-American”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
- “African-American”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
- “African-American”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
